Tuesday, July 28, 2015

Against Slow Cinema

"So my overall sense is that the Contemplative Cinema Canon doesn’t even give us a very good sense of what’s most interesting and most powerful in contemporary international art cinema today. But I think there’s more. Great works of art can be created in profoundly retrograde styles, and almost completely detached from contemporary concerns. And I think the best works of the Contemplative Cinema Canon may in fact be described in such a way. But I still think that, even at its best, Slow-Cinema-As-Default-International-Style is profoundly nostalgic and regressive — and I think that this is a bad thing. It’s a way of simulating older cinematic styles, and giving them a new appearance of Â life (or more precisely, a new zombified life-in-death), as a way of flattering classicist cinephiles, and of simply ignoring everything that has happened, socially, politically, and technologically, in the last 30 years. It’s a way of saying No to mainstream Hollywood’s current fast-edit, post-continuity, highly digital style, simply by pretending that it doesn’t even exist. And I agree with Nick James that this simply isn’t enough."- Steven Shaviro, Slow Cinema vs Fast Cinema

Nearly every art/indie film I watch these days is so fucking dull, you guys. Nearly as bad as the superhero films. Above, a great example- the infinitely dull Somewhere directed by Sofia Copolla, which was followed up by the far "faster" and incredibly superior, prescient and entertaining The Bling Ring.